


made of courage

by liadan14



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Awkward Romance, Awkward Sexual Situations, Booker is soft, Booker | Sebastien le Livre Needs a Hug, M/M, Redeemed Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Sort of redeemed Booker, Two Widowers Find Each Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:48:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26033725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: Booker feels sensitive, feels split open, feels raw like he hasn’t for a hundred one night stands who kissed him exactly the same way.Maybe it’s that Booker has been lost in his own grief, in his own emotion, for so many years that he couldn’t feel anything else.Maybe it’s that James feels so familiar under his fingertips, so many of the scars hiding under it the same ones that Booker shares.OR: Booker and Copley find a way towards each other, slowly.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/James Copley, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 20
Kudos: 294





	made of courage

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this](https://theoldguardkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1468.html?thread=249532#cmt249532) kink meme prompt. I didn't hit all the points, but some.

Booker doesn’t know why, exactly, he’s like this.

He’s been living in Copley’s spare room for going on two months, now, a comfortable halfway hell between exile and home. Nile proposed the solution after she’d turned up too late to save him from Quynh and too early to save Quynh from herself. 

Andy had been outside, when she’d suggested it, staring into the dark water of the Thames and imagining it was the ocean she’s lost Quynh into. 

Nicky had turned away, staring out the windows. _What a great idea,_ his body language had screamed. _Putting the man who betrayed us in the care of the man he used to do it._

Joe had looked straight at Booker, eyes wide and deep and so hard to hide from.

When no one had offered any verbal resistance, James had decreed the issue decided and moved Booker’s duffle bag from the floor by the back door into the guest room.

Now, eight weeks later, here he is, standing a hair’s breadth too close beside James by the stove, trying to teach him how to properly stir a béchamel sauce so it doesn’t clump.

“I thought you were so patient,” Booker teases. “The man behind the machine, running ops…”

Copley’s mouth twists in a way Booker barely catches out of the corner of his eye, trying not to stare. “Maybe I used up my patience haring after your team of assholes,” he says, pausing in his stirring _again_.

“Keep going!” Booker laughs, gripping the whisk around Copley’s hand and stirring for him. “You’ll ruin it.”

Copley turns his head by no more than fifteen degrees. His breath is warm against the cut of Booker’s jaw. 

“Can I kiss you, Sebastien?” He asks.

In an instinct instilled in Booker by teaching French classes in Quebec for most of the 1990s, he says, “I don’t know, _can_ you?”

Booker doesn’t know why he’s like this.

Copley kisses him anyway, dry and awkward, the whisk falling from both their fingers into the sauce.

The sauce turns out lumpy.

The lasagna is delicious anyway.

-

“Oh!” Booker gasps. James’ mouth is following the side of his neck down to his collarbone. 

He has been touched in the last two hundred years. He hasn’t been alone.

And yet, it feels like the skin under James’ mouth has been dead for years, awakened solely for this moment. Booker feels sensitive, feels split open, feels raw like he hasn’t for a hundred one night stands who kissed him exactly the same way. 

Maybe it’s that Booker has been lost in his own grief, in his own emotion, for so many years that he couldn’t feel anything else.

Maybe it’s that James feels so familiar under his fingertips, so many of the scars hiding under it the same ones that Booker shares.

Maybe it’s that they’ve been spending their evenings like this for weeks, soft kisses on the couch during the TV ad breaks, tasting every minute of the BBC idents chasing across the screen and separating when the show starts again, as if either of them care, as if either of them is invested in yet another topical panel show when the slide of their fingers against each other is all either of them can think about.

Maybe it’s that this – James – feels so new even though both of them feel so old.

Then, Booker’s back slams into the bookshelf, hard, and a series of tchotchkes tips over, the tiny porcelain elephant on top falling to the floor and shattering.

James takes a deep breath, a hint of suction against Booker’s collarbone, and steps back.

-

When Booker first gets his hand around James’ thick, hard dick, it takes very little time for either of them to come.

Their kisses turned too heated, tonight, to keep going on as they had. James had thrown his head back with a gasp when Booker’s hand slipped under the crinkled, poorly ironed back of his shirt, and Booker had abruptly had enough, had mashed at the remote control until the TV was off and thrown the damn thing across the room in his haste to finally, finally move this along, to move closer, to slot his knees on either side of James’ hips, to dig his fingers into James’ hair until they’re panting into each other’s mouths and Booker can feel the hot brand of his cock against his ass.

“Can I,” he doesn’t quite ask, heated and scrabbling at James’ belt buckle.

“Yes,” James says against the side of his head, “yes, yes.”

In little more than five strokes of Booker’s dry palm, James spills hot and wet over the top of his fist, slicking the way for Booker to keep touching him until he twitches in oversensitivity. 

James palms over the front of Booker’s pants, where he’s straining against the material, leaking into his boxers, gathering lint on the sticky, oversensitive head of his cock.

Booker curls in on himself as he comes, instantly, almost pained with the heat of it all.

-

They sleep on either side of James’ bed, curled away from each other, the first night.

Booker shocks awake at four AM, the phantom of a nightmare he hasn’t had in months forcing him into groggy wakefulness. He gasps out in the cold air of James’ bedroom. The window is open, and it’s October in London, and James is all the way on the other side of the bed, but he runs so hot and Booker can’t quite help himself.

He burrows closer toward James’s heat, towards the warmth of his blanket, still not quite touching him.

A hand snakes out, lazy with half-sleep, draws Booker in until his cheek is mashed up against the give of James’ pectorals.

He wakes with a crick in his neck, but it heals instantly.

-

Booker is tipsy.

He’s been good about his alcohol intake, since Quynh, since James. A glass of wine when the team closes a case and Booker and James can close their laptops and nod in satisfaction. A beer for a football match. He threw his flask into the Thames not long after he moved in with James.

Today, though, the team had been working a case in England, and the glass of wine had become a bottle, become several, all of them crowded around James’ kitchen table as he and James pretended that they were casual roommates, that they were coworkers on the phone lines for the team, that Booker hadn’t ground the pine-nuts for the pesto by hand because it might appease Nicky.

It seems to work, and the meal passes in a series of disjointed anecdotes about the time that has passed since they’ve seen each other last.

Nile laughs, harsh and bright and happy with adrenaline and success as she knocks her wine back. The rest of the team is in her sway, Andy smiling gently at a liveliness she’s only just beginning to regain with her mortality, Joe laughing along because he can’t resist happiness, and Nicky following where Joe goes.

Booker feels his heart constrict in his chest, and longs to drink more deeply, stopped only by the weight of James’ hand on his knee under the table.

“So how is he doing?” Joe asks James, leaning back in his chair. “Our prodigal son?”

James’ smile, when he looks to Booker, is so warm Booker might melt in it. “I have no complaints,” he says, a British non-answer if there ever was one. The truth is so clear on his face, though, that Booker doesn’t know how it can go unnoticed.

He follows James to his – their? – room, later, tipsy, sloppy, splays himself out between James’ thighs. His fingers are clumsy on James’ belt buckle and James is slow to help him, laughing warmly at Booker as he struggles to get at what lies beneath.

He’s so earnest, this man, so serious with the hand life has dealt him. His laugh makes Booker feel like he’s done something right at last.

“I haven’t done this in a long time,” Booker warns as he lowers his mouth to James’ cock. 

“I have no complaints,” James repeats.

Booker tries to recall what he likes best, when this happens to him. His jaw aches after mere moments, and he lets saliva drip down James’ cock as he goes, gripping the lion’s share of his shaft and using the wet of his own spit to smooth the glide. He rubs his tongue along the head, relishing the low, rumbling noise James makes.

He chances a look up at James through the fringe of his hair, meets James’ dark eyes, sees James’ head tip back the way it does when he’s overwhelmed, and Booker redoubles his work, allowing the wet, sucking noises he’s making as he pushes his mouth down on James’s cock over and over to escape.

Halfway through, he has to pull off, jaw too sore to continue, James’ hand knocking his own away to pull at his dick desperately, dragging Booker up to the head of the bed to crash their mouths together in some vague approximation of a kiss.

“Sebastien,” James gasps, and in that moment, Booker almost says, drunk and loose and nearly happy, that he loves that James calls him that, that he loves James.

He holds himself back only by virtue of the press of James’ hands against his shoulders, pushing him back down to smear his sore mouth over the head of James’ cock as he convulses into the bedsheets and comes straight into Booker’s mouth, moaning far too loudly for a full house. Booker swallows it down, basks in the touch of James’ hands, loosening in his hair from the harsh grip of desperation to the gentle card of his fingers across Booker’s scalp.

Booker rests his forehead against James’ thigh, overwhelmed.

“What can I do for you?” James asks.

“Let me stay with you,” Booker answers, too far gone for dignity.

-

In the morning, Joe suggests, over coffee, that he might have several lifetimes of wisdom for Booker on the subject of sex between two men. “I have many years of experience,” he points out, eyes dancing even as the rest of his face remains serious. “It certainly sounded like you’re doing fine on your own last night, but your elders are always wiser.”

For the first time since the last time in London, Nicky looks straight at Booker. “Believe nothing he says. Anal sex in the Middle Ages was a very different experience.”

Joe looks as if he is about to say something that Booker will have to spend the next hundred or so years trying very hard to forget, but James walks into the kitchen then and smiles his little smile at Booker.

He’s wearing his usual dress pants and button-down shirt, and he hasn’t ironed the back properly again because his wife used to do the ironing, and he looks upright and functional, but Booker knows he won’t really understand anything that’s happening until he’s had a cup of coffee and sat down for a good twenty minutes while he sips it and scrolls through the news on his phone.

He swallows around the weight of his own fondness, but when he looks up from the floor, he finds that James still hasn’t looked away again and he’s been caught caring in the full light of day. Behind James, Joe and Nicky’s teasing smiles melt into what Booker knows to be approval even if he can barely stomach it. 

James is still smiling, so perhaps it is alright.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://bewires.tumblr.com)
> 
> The title is a play on a Nena song - "Liebe wird aus Mut gemacht", or "love is made of courage"


End file.
